People who are subject to deportation orders in the UK will soon be required to carry a GPS-enabled fingerprint scanner at all times, so that the Home Office can verify their location and identity, Âéśš´ŤĂ˝ has learned. Privacy campaigners say the devices are a form of unnecessary biometric surveillance that could exacerbate people’s mental health problems.

The UK began using GPS-enabled ankle tags to track adult foreign-national offenders who are subject to deportation orders . People in this position, also known as immigration bail, aren’t UK citizens and have committed a crime that resulted in a custodial sentence of more than 12 months or are considered to be “persistent offenders”. According to the most recent data, as of , 2146 people were being monitored in this way.

The new devices, which resemble a large key fob and are produced by , will be given to people on immigration bail soon, the Home Office has confirmed. They will track an individual’s location 24 hours a day. at Privacy International says the charity understands that the devices will be rolled out this autumn.

Users of the device will have to scan their fingers when prompted, to confirm their identity and proximity to the device. The Home Office wouldn’t say how often this will be required and hasn’t said explicitly why the fingerprint scanners will be better than ankle tags.

In a report produced by earlier this year, Home Office officials said that such devices may be used to monitor people with “vulnerabilities” that prevent them from wearing an ankle tag or those who are “considered lower harm” to the public.

But these new devices are just as intrusive as ankle tags, says Audibert. “People will still have their location tracked 24/7 and further anxiety may come from being unable to submit your fingerprint scan for one reason or another.”

“It may also feed into the normalisation of GPS tracking as it becomes physically and morally more tolerable and acceptable to wear this new device than an ankle tag that is loaded with stigma,” she says.

, the UK’s biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner, whose job is to ensure fingerprint data used by the police complies with the government’s code of practice, says he had no idea that the Home Office was going to bring in these devices.

“Increasingly, there are other agencies using biometrics that aren’t the police,” he says. “The government does not regard this as falling within my remit.”

“It doesn’t come under the surveillance camera code and therefore the only thing that is left to comply with is the general law of the land, and specifically data protection laws,” he says. The Home Office says its use of data gathered from these devices will comply with these laws.

A lawyer who has represented several clients who have been required to wear GPS ankle tags and wishes to remain anonymous says the safeguards in place to protect vulnerable people aren’t good enough.

Many people who are subject to deportation orders experience post-traumatic stress disorder, says the lawyer, and so 24-hour GPS monitoring may exacerbate their condition. They say the Home Office only provides lawyers and their clients a few days to gather the medical evidence required to argue against the use of GPS tags before they are fitted. The Home Office says it follows published bail guidance on representations from individuals.

“We’ve had several cases where we’ve got evidence showing that GPS tags are exacerbating trauma for very vulnerable individuals,” says the lawyer. Only after several weeks of back and forth will the Home Office back down from their initial judgement to tag someone, they add.

“The public rightly expects us to carry out our legal duty to electronically monitor any foreign criminals released on immigration bail whilst awaiting deportation,” a Home Office spokesperson says. “A decision to tag is taken on a case-by-case basis and a combination of fitted and non-fitted devices is used.”

Buddi declined to comment.

Ěý

Fear of reprisals

Never let ’em see you sweat. It might appear to be sound advice, but maybe not for people who stream their gaming online. They seem to do better with audiences if they broadcast details like their heart rate and sweat levels.

Lots of us now spend a big chunk of our time watching others play games. Roughly 10Ěýmillion people tune in every day to watch the more than 2Ěýmillion people who stream their games on platforms like the Amazon-owned Twitch. Many of these live‑streamers hope to make it to professional e-sports contests, where the big names can take home millions of dollars.

But winning and keeping an audience is hard. There are lots ofĚýgames to watch, and Twitch spectators are a fickle bunch. Some watch certain gamers consistently, others tune in for only half an hour every day, says Raquel Robinson at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

To keep viewers hooked, gamers dip into an evolving bag of tricks, for example, sharing performance statistics, playing music and displaying live chat comments in a frame that surrounds the view of the game itself. Robinson has given them a new trick: a peek into the state of their own minds and bodies.

Robinson and her colleagues created a prototype tool called AllĚýthe Feels. The software pulls physiological data from a Fitbit-like wristband and displays the readings in a bar graph next to theĚýgaming window.

It also uses face recognition software to turn the player’s emotional state into one more feature of the game. When it determines that their joy, surprise, anger, disgust, sadness or fear has hit a certain threshold, the corresponding emoji flashes up on screen.

“Everyone likes the voyeurism of seeing someone’s insides,” says Regan Mandryk at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada.

The viewers Robinson’s team tested the tool on certainly did. The team observed them as they viewed a single gamer, first during a 1-hour session without the biometric data in the video stream, and then 1 hour with.

In a survey, 70 per cent said they felt more connected when they could view the player’s physiological state. The team alsoĚýfound that this more than doubled chat participation and the number of viewers who stayed the whole hour. The work will be presented at the in Massachusetts on 16 August (DOI: 10.1145/3102103).

Though this was only a small pilot study, Robinson says the biometric add-on has elicited interest even in people who neverĚýwatch video gaming. “I can see it being a frontier for getting into the head of a professional athlete too,” says Mandryk.

This article will appear in print under the headline “Gamers’ vital signs help their fans stay hooked”

A baby falling back to sleep at 2 am to a gentle lullaby may convince its parents that music can induce sleep, but new compositions designed to help listeners relax sound rather different to Rock-a-bye Baby.

Boston-based start-up uses biometrics to tailor music to your mood. Its app measures your heart beat via your smartphone’s accelerometer and uses these readings to tweak a relaxing ambient track by UK band Marconi Union. After listening, you take a brief survey. How relaxed do you feel?

“Music can be used for everyday wellness as well as for clinical applications,” says Sync Project co-founder Ketki Karanam. Relaxation and sleep was an obvious place to start. “We decided to start by focusing on relaxation as we felt that was one area where people were using music to calm themselves down or relax,” she says. And people with sleep conditions are often looking for drug-free ways to sleep better.

As well as the Unwind app, the company plans to collect biometric data from attendees at an overnight performance of neoclassical composer Max Richter’s eight-hour album Sleep – designed to help people nod off – at the next month.

Concertgoers will be invited to wear activity-tracking , which also monitor heart rate and body temperature. In addition, the volunteers will wear the rings while going to sleep at home, with and without the aid of Richter’s composition.

AI music treatment

The Sync Project team will then analyse the readings for insights into how the music might affect sleep and relaxation. Participants will also report back on their stress and relaxation levels before and after listening to the music.

Ultimately, Sync Project aims to develop its own AI-based music treatment tools for different situations, from everyday wellness to clinical applications. Karanam even points to studies examining music’s impact on people affected by conditions such as , and .

But neuroscientist at Stanford University in California, who was an adviser to Richter on the Sleep album, is sceptical. Repetitive, unsurprising music helps the brain go into a relaxed state – but does little more, he says.

“Music has certain obvious ways it can excite or relax us, but there are limits and it certainly can’t replace real treatments,” he says. In the ąĘ˛š°ů°ěžą˛Ô˛ő´Ç˛Ô’s research, music could help people keep their muscles moving better and stop them “freezing” while walking, he says – but clapping works just as well.

Music can be a useful distraction, which can help with insomnia or pain relief, says , director of the Clinical Sleep Research Unit at Loughborough University, UK. “That said, if the presenting insomnia is so ‘mild’ it can be effectively managed with Spotify, it’s unlikely to have been a major clinical issue in the first place,” he says.

Controlled, academic tests of Sync Project’s tools remain necessary, as people who opt in to use them are already likely to be music fans, Morgan says. “Keep in mind that those who like listening to music as a lifestyle choice do so because it delivers emotional/psychological benefits,” he says. “That it also delivers these benefits to the same people when they’re sick would be unsurprising.”

Human weak link

Live in the US? There’s a 50:50 chance that you’re in a police face recognition database, according to from the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law in Washington DC. The findings suggest that about a quarter of all police departments in the US have access to face recognition technology.

That police are using face recognition technology is not a problem in itself. In a world with a camera in every pocket, they would be daft not to. But face recognition can be used far more broadly than fingerprint recognition, which means it carries a higher risk of tagging innocent people.

Fingerprints are difficult to work with. Prints from known criminals can only be gathered in controlled environments at police stations, and dusting for prints is so time consuming that it is only done at relevant crime scenes. This narrows down the number of people in the sights of any one investigation.

It’s much easier to build huge databases of identified photographs. The majority of the 117 million faces in the police datasets come from state driving licenses and ID cards. And when trying to solve a crime, gathering faces is as easy as pointing a camera at the street. People attending protests, visiting their church, or just walking by can all have their faces “dusted” without ever knowing it.

Tech isn’t colourblind

That means most of the faces in the database are the innocent public, not hardened crooks, giving police forces a bigger canvas on which to make mistakes. “It’s uncharted and frankly dangerous territory,”Ěý said , who led the Georgetown report, .

And face recognition software is far from perfect. Under ideal conditions, which are rarely achieved in reality, face recognition is less accurate than fingerprint recognition, says of ĚýMichigan State University.

Facebook’s face recognition software has made headlines for “”, but systems dealing with grainy CCTV images are nowhere near this good. A big database of innocent people could actually make it harder to fight crime, because the software may start turning up more false matches than human investigators can check.

There are next to no regulations on how the police use this technology, or how much weight they give to its results. Face recognition’s mystique is strong enough that, without guidance, officers may overvalue the software’s output, and unconsciously favour evidence that matches its results.

Face recognition systems are also likely to be biased against black people. Since black people are arrested more often than white people, black faces are over-represented in the mugshot databases. This means that innocent black people are more likely to be linked to a crime by face recognition than innocent white people.

Face in the crowd

At the same time, has shown that commercial face recognition software is less accurate at analysing the faces of black people, women and children, compared with white men. So not only is the software likely to point the finger at a larger number of black people, it also points less accurately at black people than anyone else.

None of the four main companies selling face recognition technology – Cognitec, NEC, 3M Cogent and Morpho – are open about how their software works, or what datasets they use to train it. “They will not tell you what is the size of their database or where they get it from,” says Jain. “That’s all proprietary.”

Not even the FBI knows what it’s doing. In May this year, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) on the FBI’s face recognition programme, stating the agency had not tested to see how often errors occurred. By conducting better tests, the GAO said, the FBI could be more sure that its system “provide leads that help enhance, rather than hinder, criminal investigations”.

Like all forensic techniques, face recognition has the power to catch criminals police might otherwise miss. But to do so, its results must be transparent and reliable – otherwise you might as well just pick someone out of the crowd.

“Taking babies’ fingerprints could help monitor vaccinations and identify infants swapped at birth“

Noggin login

You will know me by the buzz in my head. SkullConduct, a biometric system made by Stefan Schneegass at the University of Stuttgart in Germany and his team, uses the unique way a sound wave changes as it passes through bone in our skull to ID individuals with 97 per cent accuracy. It could be built into smart glasses or VR headsets to log people in automatically.

“There was no actual damage to the plane and there’s indeed some speculation that it may have been a plastic bag”

UK transport minister Robert Goodwill admits we don’t yet know if a drone was involved in the “drone strike” of 17 April

Virtual hands off

a back-off button. A number of people complained last week about sexual harassment in AltspaceVR, one of the Oculus Rift’s most well-received apps, in which people can watch films together or shop in virtual stores. But women have reported male avatars coming too close or making sexual gestures. They have called for VR to include ways to protect personal space.